Stephen Bradford Long recently published a popular Note about the jobs of Substackers. A lot of people chimed in to talk about their own unglamorous jobs, and it’s inspired me to do the same. I am finishing up training in a new field and don’t currently have a job right now, so I decided to talk about all the ones I’ve had before now. As it turns out, there have been a lot of them, so this is going to be a two-parter. I’ve broken it down by my age when I started because I think that’s more interesting than the years, but the first job started in 1998 for some reference.
This kind of feels like writing that absurdly long essay about my political trajectory that I can’t believe anyone actually read. It’s like a half hour long.
Suburban movie theater, 14
I worked here with my childhood best friend. We got to see movies for free (and bring all our friends!) and got unlimited free popcorn and soda. Us younger high school kids were only allowed to work the matinee shifts, and teenagers pretty much ran the place every weekend. It was a glorious first job. I made the state minimum wage, which was $5.15/hr at the time. I felt rich every time I got a paycheck.
Mall shoe store, 15
I lied about my age on the application for this job because you had to be 16 to work in mall stores. I got away with it because my 17 year old boyfriend was the assistant manager. I was hired to dye shoes, but never actually ended up doing that because the store decided to start going out of business and stopped the shoe dyeing service right after I was hired, so I was just a regular sales girl selling clearance footwear to old people. This is the job where I learned the Secrets of the Mall: if I went into Barnes & Noble and a certain person was working, I could get any magazine I wanted for free. He'd just rip the cover off and send me on my way.
Other friends worked in a clothing store a few shops down. After all the managers went home for the day, leaving the high school kids in charge, we'd give each other sweet deals like “two outfits for $100, cash only” in exchange for “two pair of shoes for $100, cash only.” Yeah, it was all just high school kids straight up letting each other steal from our respective jobs. I felt very icky about the shoes and clothing situation and did not participate in that particular grift. The free magazines and Auntie Anne's were okay by me, though.
Neighborhood convenience store, 15
My sister and friends and I used to ride our bikes to this little store all the time as kids to buy candy and chips and magazines and other junk. I was so excited to start working there after the shoe store finally closed for good. Unfortunately, I had to man the store alone every shift, the looming threat of robbery terrifying me. Fred, the crotchety old owner, would come in with shopping bags full of food from Cub, the normal grocery store nearby, hand me the price gun, and tell me how much to mark them all up before shelving them.
We sold beer, but it was Minnesota so it was only 3.2% ABV (regular beer is only sold in dedicated liquor stores). That was enough for Clarence, though, the ancient alcoholic who smelled like he bathed in fermented sweat and old urine and came in every morning to buy a 6-pack of Milwaukee's Best. Because I was only 15, I could not legally touch the beer cans to ring him up, so he'd do it himself. Then he'd hobble out and I'd take the can of air freshener from under the counter that we kept specifically for Clarence's daily visits and spray his stench out of the place (this would prepare me for later work as a postal clerk in rural Virginia).
My friends and I had just discovered cigarettes that previous school year (during track practice, no less), but we were not rebellious enough kids to actually know how to acquire our own and I was too scared to steal them from my mom. The convenience store did, of course, sell cigarettes, so I concocted a plan. I realized I could wait until the garbage bag was almost ready to take out to the dumpster, start stocking cigarettes, leave one pack in the nearly-empty carton, and toss the “empty” carton on the top of the garbage pile out of the security camera's view. When I’d bring the bag to the dumpster, I’d remove the pack, stick it in my pocket, and go back in as though nothing had happened. I waited for the right moment for several shifts and, after a few abandoned attempts, finally managed to snag a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights. I didn’t really want to steal them, but being underage and also responsible for balancing the till left me no choice, really, or so I reasoned.
A few months in, I tried to quit the job by leaving a note on the door for Fred, explaining that I didn't feel safe working alone, encouraged by my shoe store boyfriend who now worked at the clothing store we used to trade with. When I told my mom what I'd done that morning, she was appalled. “You do not quit a job without giving two weeks’ notice! You go back there and apologize right now!”
I did as she said, fully shamed and dreading what I’d go in to. A vendor was there in the parking lot reading the note taped to the door. He saw me walk up and looked back at the note, remarking how that was bad news, not realizing I was the one who wrote it. I pretended I had no idea what was going on and opened the store like normal, covering for that mysterious flake who quit via taped door note. Fred never did find out that I quit for a couple hours that day.
One-hour photo lab, 16
This was the job I'd been dreaming of ever since I stepped foot in the mall for my shady shoe store stint. I never left the house without a camera and obsessed over being a famous fashion photographer someday and I desperately wanted the massive employee discount on film and developing, which was becoming a very expensive hobby. I interviewed a few weeks before my 16th birthday and they hired me, making me wait to start until I was officially 16. I stayed there until I was 22 and left as a wildly underpaid lab manager. The “wildly underpaid” bit is why there are still several more jobs to list during the six-year period I was with the photo lab.
Six years at what were technically three different photo labs (it’ll make sense in a minute) provided for some very interesting party-story fodder. There was the exhibitionist couple who got off on making us look at their pictures as many times as possible, so after learning how the developing and printing processes worked, the husband started manipulating it. He’d order doubles with one set matte, one set glossy, and then have them scanned to a CD, knowing each of those three things required a separate scan that showed the images on the screen where we color-corrected them. They appeared to be in their 60s and were very glamorous, and the photos tended to show them in upscale places where they would take pictures of themselves flashing people or doing other various “fun” things like peeing on fire hydrants in cocktail dresses or making strangers at gas stations try on a long fur coat that was just covering the woman’s naked body. Once, we got to see a Sprite bottle halfway up her vag. I was impressed.
Once, a woman came in with some digital media cards (this was 2002ish when that sort of thing was still new). She saw the lab full of young female employees, glared at us, and told the guys behind the sales counter that only a man was allowed to print her pictures. Confused and probably a little afraid, the sales guy who helped her readily agreed.
…Absolutely none of the sales guys any idea how to print a photo, so those of us in the lab hurried to open the images so we could see what on earth her problem was. The sales guys stood behind us, also eager to see. At first it was just a bunch of pictures of the hockey game the night before, but then we got to the real reason she didn’t want the ladies peeking: about a zillion photos of a naked Wild player in her bathtub after the game. Ope! We committed to the bit and pretended we never saw them, avoiding eye contact.
Hostess at Baker's Square, 16
All my friends and I decided we wanted to be servers. We heard that waiters and waitresses made way more money than anyone else in high school, so we all applied at nearby restaurants. Stacey and I got hired at Baker's Square as hostesses where we sat guests and bussed tables. We had to wear real ties, and my manager kindly tied mine for me on my first day since I had no idea how to do it. Bella and Matthew got hired at Denny's where they were made servers pretty much instantly. Stacey was quickly promoted to server at our restaurant, and they told me I needed more “hustle” before I could get there myself. I realized quickly that I hated working in restaurants.
I smoked weed by the dumpsters with the cooks, listening to Papa Roach and Eminem blasting from someone's tinny car speakers, and as soon as my tie, which I'd been loosening and re-tightening every work day, was finally too uneven to ignore, I decided it was time to go. I didn't want to ask my manager to help again and figured I didn't really need two jobs in high school in addition to sports and everything else and gave my notice.
The photo lab I still worked at was bought out by a larger camera store and moved out of the mall, rebranded, to its own building down the road. This was a larger facility and we had a newer, better printer that could handle both matte and glossy paper. I started to notice patterns in who was ordering what. We happened to be in the statistics unit of my math class, so I decided to make my project about which paper was favored by each ethnicity, gender, and age. I kept a running tally by the register. I got some weird looks from coworkers and my teacher. Anyway, Liberian immigrants overwhelmingly preferred glossy paper, and retirement-age white women almost always chose matte. Just as I had suspected.
This camera store was staffed by mostly other high school students, and most of the girls were obsessed with N*SYNC. They'd have fan club (!) photos sent to the outlab to make specialized photo products like plastic standees or keychains of Justin Timberlake or Lance Bass or whatever. They’d take them home, then leave the empty envelopes with the bar code in the bin to pay for later. We all did that for our own photos, even though we got a 70% discount on lab services; we would just wait until pay day and buy them all at once.
Then we got a new district manager. The store manager warned us that he was coming in and told us to either pay for our empty envelopes or bring the products or prints back in so they looked like they were still waiting to be picked up. I got the memo too late, didn’t have a chance to do either thing, and the DM fired me, the empty envelopes indicating that I had “stolen” from them.
After getting fired from my beloved photo lab, I promptly got hired at the competing photo lab in a different mall across the river, shortly before high school graduation. Not long after that, that photo lab bought the one that fired me and kept the district manager responsible for it. I bleached my hair and hid from him at the company Christmas party.
Gas station clerk, 18
My mom was working as a general manager for a local gas station chain and told me one of the stores was hiring, so I applied for a part-time job as a cashier.
It was the most boring job of my life, but I worked with two extremely cool dudes every Sunday who worked out a good deal: race to get everything stocked and changed and done at the beginning of the shift, then take turns going on hour-long breaks for the full 8 hours until the end when we'd race to finish everything for the overnight crew. It was staggered so that each of us would only have to actively work for 30 minutes at a time, at which point someone else would come in and relieve you so you could go back to chain-smoking in the parking lot for an hour.
Glamor Shots, 20
This was it. I was going to be a real photographer, getting paid to make people look pretty and then capturing it on film. I applied at the Mall of America location and, to my surprise, was hired immediately. I put in my notice at the photo lab and went into Glamor Shots for my first day of training, where I quickly learned that I was barely a photographer and mostly just a sales person who got to use a camera sometimes and was instructed to tell women to suck in their fat guts and physically touch them to get them into more flattering poses. I quit on the spot and took back my two-week notice at the photo lab.
A different gas station, 20
I picked up this second job to save money for something I don’t even remember anymore. I was working full-time at the photo lab and worked a few nights a week on the overnight shift at a different gas station chain. The most interesting thing about this job was the fact that it fucked up my sleep schedule so badly that I was up at all hours of the night and got to see what kind of weird shit happened in my neighborhood after dark.
One night, I was outside smoking a cigarette when I saw a shadowy figure out of the corner of my eye. I stood on the top step and peered around the bay window to get a better look, and slowly she came into focus: a very drunk woman wearing a leather coat with an American flag design on the back, pants around her ankles, stumbling around the front yard. She was doing something with her hands… holding a stick. She was shoving the stick into her vagina. Like a fucking dildo. I turned around and ran back inside and up the stairs to our duplex unit and found one of my roommates who also worked weird hours and was still awake, and he followed me outside. He managed to shoo her away and we watched as she stumbled across the street, trying to button her pants.
Saint Paul, capital city of Minnesota, full of caves and also bats that get trapped in your house and drunk ladies who masturbate with sticks in your front yard.
Best Buy camera sales, 22
After I finally left the photo lab world (yelling “I HATE THIS PLACE! I QUIT!” at my amused manager before apologizing and giving him a 3-week notice to make up for it), I had a hard time finding another job. I finally, very ironically, ended up selling cameras at Best Buy. During the interview, I told them about my experience at the labs and camera stores and said that I wanted to work in the camera department. I was regretting quitting the photo lab and my incredible disdain for resorting to selling cameras at a big box electronics store was written all over my face. They ignored that and said that while my camera store experience was nice and all, they needed someone in computers. I told them I didn't know anything about computers and informed them that I (an artiste) had an iMac, which they didn't even sell. They said that was okay, I'd learn. I insisted. They acquiesced and put me in the camera department.
Geek Squad, 22
After a few months in the camera department that I fought to get into because I didn't know anything about computers, I developed a crush on one of the techs from the in-store Geek Squad and decided I needed to work directly with him. His name was Kyle and his dark hair looked like one of those swirly Dairy Queen ice cream cones and he had bright blue eyes. His skin was like porcelain; he looked like a male Snow White. I was obsessed. I begged my manager for a transfer to Geek Squad and he literally laughed at me. I wore him down, though, and was finally allowed to take the exam to see if I qualified.
I failed the test spectacularly, but I quickly learned that everyone else did, too, even my beloved Kyle, and that because I was the only Mac user in the store who answered the two related questions correctly, I actually scored higher than both of my soon-to-be bosses. I was given the coveted Geek Squad jacket and clip-on tie and rewarded with endless dull hours removing Spyware from old desktop computers and blowing the dust out of them with an air gun thing. I found out Kyle was engaged, got sad, and started dating a much worse Kyle who worked in customer service. Worst crush rebound ever.
Bank call center, 22
My little sister got a job lead for a business banking position with a national bank’s call center. She was making a whopping $12.60 an hour, and I wanted in. Geek Squad only paid just over $10 and I was over it. I got the job. I did not yet know that everyone who applies at call centers gets the job. My grandma congratulated me on having a “good job” in a bank instead of the wildly-underpaying photo lab. She apparently did not know about call centers, either.
I made a lot of friends there, despite it being a terrible job. I got my row hooked on sunflower seeds and I took turns buying them for the team with the guy who sat next to me. We would later learn that he was one of the primary vectors of the Great Office Chlamydia Outbreak. I had thankfully only shared sunflower seeds with the man. Marked safe.
Red Lobster, 24
I quit the bank after a year and a half by driving in one summer morning, smoking a cigarette on a bench in front of the building, grudgingly walking up to the door, suddenly deciding I had had absolutely enough, and turned around and went back to my car. I drove directly to the liquor store, bought a case of beer, got shit-faced, and called my supervisor and left her a voicemail telling her I was never coming back, because fuck that place. I stayed drunk for another couple days and then got a job serving at Red Lobster, the first place I applied to that would call me back. I figured I’d give restaurants another shot and try to be a real server this time, where the money (allegedly) was. I used the new employment opportunity to cheat on Bad Kyle with a 20 year old fellow server, Tom, who would continue to send me random dick pics for the next five years.
Smaller bank call center, 24
I could not hack server life. After a few torturous months, I secured a job in a different, smaller bank's call center. I didn't bother giving Red Lobster a notice and just stopped showing up. No one ever called to ask if I was coming back, which I thought was strange. I would later learn that it was because that's just how everyone quits restaurants.
The smaller regional bank I was working for was pretty dismal compared to the national bank’s much larger, nicer, and brighter suburban facility. The smaller bank's call center was in the sub-basement of their building downtown and there were always yellow happy face balloons, slowly bobbing up and down in various cubes, rewards for good calls or something, looking down on you menacingly from the dimly-lit flickering ceiling lights like sadistic clowns. It was dark and the customers were much more angry and needed a lot of extremely basic things explained to them. It was endlessly grating. I set up a blog to complain about it.
If you've never worked in a call center, especially as a female, you may not know that perverted dudes love to call random toll-free numbers, asking innocuous and vague questions at first without ever giving identifying account information, guiding the conversation in a gradually weirder direction, finally ending it by saying something like, “I'M COMING RIGHT NOW” after you confirmed a branch's hours or something, grunting, and hanging up on you just as you realize he was jerking off to the sound of your voice, or to the knowledge that you didn't know he had his dick in his hand the whole time, or whatever it was that gave these dudes their kicks. It felt like someone just jizzed in your fucking ear and you wanted to take a shower immediately.
Anyway, this happened at Smaller Regional Bank so often that I started copying down these dudes’ phone numbers from the caller ID after they'd get off (heh) the phone. I knew this was against every rule, so I didn’t put their names next to them as a precaution, just symbols indicating the nature of their grossness. I had no specific plans for these phone numbers, but fantasies of revenge were in the back of my mind.
One night a few months later, my boyfriend and I were hanging out listening to music and having a few beers. I had a different job at the bank by that point, but I still had those phone numbers in the back of a notebook in my purse. I told Boyfriend about it and he grinned like a cartoon villain.
“Let me see those phone numbers.”
I gave him the sheet and he put his cell phone on speaker. He dialed one of the most recent numbers, someone I clearly remembered for being even more graphically disgusting than the usual pervs. Dude answered and Boyfriend began his act as an aggressive gay man trying to solicit phone sex. The dude who had previously said similar things to me was so disgusted he started yelling and swearing at Boyfriend until he finally hung up on him.
I threw away the phone numbers. My desire for revenge was satiated.
Check card and ATM fraud investigator, 24
This was a promotion out of the smaller bank’s call center and probably one of the more interesting jobs I've had, although it came with the biggest circus side show cast of characters so catty and insane that HR was up there every week trying to meditate our trainwreck of a department. Someone was always crying or bullying someone or fucking one of the bosses or telling the local NPR member station about their bullshit.
My favorite part of the job was catching people trying to defraud the bank. It was a pretty easy process: customer claims someone some their ATM card and withdrew money. I go find the video footage from the ATM transaction and compare it to images from other, undisputed withdrawals. I'd see the same person on each and deny the claim. They'd call back, furious, then scared, and ask if they were going to jail. No, we never did send anyone to jail for attempted fraud, but we did get reimbursed if the court was able to get any restitution for the claims we reimbursed that were actual fraud against the customer. We had a recliner and a large television shoved between some cubes for awhile, items a suspect had purchased with the stolen money we’d paid back to a customer who’d been defrauded, until someone figured out how to sell them.
A little over a year after I quit that job, it was 2012 and everyone was unemployed, including me, having just been fired from my third bank job after openly protesting the place for months during Occupy. I texted an old boss from that bank fraud job, the one who made everyone cry all the time, and asked him if he'd be a reference.
“You're very bright and you were a good analyst, but you're stubborn as hell and have no respect for authority. Absolutely not.” I found this hilarious and told everyone.
Clean water salesperson fundraiser, 27
Before this bout of unemployment, a few months after I’d quit the fraud investigation job, I decided I was never working for another corrupt financial institution again and decided to find a job doing something meaningful. Among many of my fellow progressive friends, fundraising was all the rage. I found a job with a couple friends at a nonprofit that focused on clean water lobbying efforts. My job was to call previous donors and ask them for more money.
This was in Minneapolis, but I was calling people who lived in New Jersey. The script I had to use instructed me to say things like “our governor Christie” and to vaguely mutter “mmm” when someone asked if we were calling them from New Jersey instead of “yes” (or, you know, no, since we weren’t). If someone needed a callback from a supervisor, there was a special cell phone with a New Jersey area code specifically for that purpose.
Anyway, because I hated sales and that’s all fundraising really is in the end, I loathed every second of that 4-hour shift and told the supervisor I wouldn’t be coming back at the end of it.
We’re getting close to being too long for email, so…
I just read all that. Every word ... instead of going to bed at a reasonable time.
I love your writing.
Keep smashing it girl :)
I absolutely loved this. So familiar and yet so hilarious, from the attempts to avoid quitting by ghosting or leaving a note, to the photo lab stories. I always wondered what it was like to work at a photo lab, and I can still remember viscerally how those stores smelled. I also made friends call bosses and pretend to be me and quit on my behalf, because I was too chicken.
This is great writing, I loved this piece. You're so cute and silly in that camera store photo too.